Any ETA for patch 1.4 for BG1EE and BG2EE
enhancedgamerx
Member Posts: 90
I noticed there isn't any "The road to 1.4" thread for either of the BGEEs so I would like to ask that is it under the works and is there any ETA for it? Cheers!
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Comments
I am assuming it will come out at the same time as Adventure Y which hopefully be sometime soon.
When it comes to fixing errors, no matter how small, I'd prefer small patches along the way (1.31, 1.32 or whatnot) to waiting for indefinite periods of changes for massive fix-packs with (fill in the blanks). That said, I'm not even positive that a 1.4 is in the works for anything, other than to provide coding support to whatever is brought by Adventure Y.
As far as them making money hand over fist (which could be the case but I somehow doubt it) they've clearly got to have other projects on the go in order to stay viable. If anything if they are making money hand over fist on this I'm happy if only because it may encourage other developers to look into these sorts of games.
Heck the fact that they are still even considering patching BGEE is great but also its sadly impressive in this market. Bioware for instance would never patch a game 2 years after release. Thats not because Bioware games are bug free either.
Once you have that mod, it is a very different thing to bundle it into the original source of the main game, than act as an after market hack. There are benefits to getting a real integration, and we heard up front how one of the goals of BeamDog is to make these products /more/ mod-friendly by easily exposing to modders all the features they have needed for their own enhancements.
I'm not thrilled at the rate of patches myself, it took 15 months to get what I would accept as a playable version of BG2EE via the Mac App store (as we missed the critical first patch) but the actual process of releasing software is a surprising amount of work if you have never done it before. The demands on a small team to stop development and tick all the boxes required to actually release the product in a variety of stores could alone be incentive for a long release cycle - otherwise you spend more time in process overhead than actually working on the product itself.
b) IWD-in-BG2: I think you're being a little generous on this one. Isn't this an unsupported project that mostly, maybe works? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
I could never go back to the loading screens of non-EE versions. The instantaneous loading in the EE between saves and areas is awesome. I played BG2 (non-EE) after BGEE and even with my solid-state hard drive, the loading times just aren't something I could ever go back to now that I have the option for the EEs.
The ability to zoom in and out on all screens is also a huge plus.
And then having a UI designed for widescreen is another improvement you can't get out of the originals. Yes, the originals have mods for widescreen support, but reading dialogs is a huge pain. 12 pt font stretched across a 1920x1080 monitor? Talk about a readability nightmare.
To your point about mod kits and the silent plurality: remember when Beamdog was changing font sizes in one of the patches? People were super vocal and that was just from a beta testing patch that not every customer had access to. If more people cared about displaying 9 kits on the screen, they would be vocal about it.
This isn't to say there shouldn't be a patch for BGEE (I mean, improvements were made to the quickloot function in BG2EE and IWDEE, patches that came out just after the last BGEE patch. Why hasn't that been added to BGEE?), but to say that the originals have everything the EEs have just isn't true.
In my almost 3 years here I've seen maybe 3 threads specifically regarding the issue of there being a 9 kit limit. That is out of about 2.5 thousand feature requests for the game. Its a vocal minority of people who care enough to comment about it. I mean sure if you were to make a poll and ask people if they wanted this feature they would say they would but they would say the same about any feature they felt would make the game more moddable (regardless of feasibility).
Beamdog has to have whatever they produce work reliably on Ipads/Iphones, Android phones/tablets, Macs, Windows, and Linux. As far as I know TOBEX only works on windows. @Ascension64 may be able to provide technical reasons why some TOBEX components might have difficulty working in the EE engine. Though I do have to ask if you actually requested this as per how @AndreaColombo outlined here.
Edit: Just realized Ascension64 hasn't been on in quite some time. Ahh well.
As an aside, it never ceases to amaze me what folks expect for $20 these days. I've gotten well over a year's worth of enjoyment from the amount of money it takes to fill up my car with gas. I think we gamers need to have a sense of perspective about that. My 2 cents for what it's worth...
When IWD:EE came out - nearly six months ago, mind - there was talk of kitting Branwen as a Priest of Tempus, and introducing a Priest of Shar kit (which could then be applied to Viconia). Surprise surprise, it didn't happen.
Even if there're other examples of patching products long after they have been released, @elminster 's point still stands: this is not a common behavior. Also, the NWN situation dates back to 2008. The market of videogames changed drastically since than. Again, it's not such a common thing now to see a patch 2 years after the release.